A democratic asteroid that wiped out many old habits: Sunil Khilnani

Modi is the first head of government to have been born after 1947, and his relationship to India’s recent and ancient history is casual and instrumental.

By Sunil Khilnani

The May 16 electoral result declared is a landmark in India's political history — a genuinely revolutionary moment. In a record turnout — at some 550 million, larger than any of the previous 15 national elections — Indians, faced with hundreds of party options, have given a clear majority not just to one party, but to one man.

A vesting of 'new power in new persons', was Edmund Burke's phrase to describe revolution: though in this case we have but a new person, and also a new view of power. What better demonstration, especially for India's young citizens, of the awesome power of free choice to change our governors?

Impacting like a democratic asteroid, Modi has wiped out the Congress, which indolently had come to assume it was history and biology's gift to the Indian people. Collateral damage was not just to Delhi's political elite, but to the old seniors of his own BJP. And one rich irony in this election is how Congress's own policies have made it impossible for the defeated to argue that the electorate has been too easily swayed.

Through now-disparaged aid and 'entitlements', and despite corruption in social programmes, the Congress left behind a better educated population with more consistent access, even in rural areas, to information about the functioning of their country. Voters this year had sharper tools than ever in Indian history to judge their leadership. And they found it decidedly wanting.

Disrupting all habits of national politics, Modi has delivered the first-ever parliamentary majority to the BJP — and the first for any party in India in well over a generation. The comparison with Rajiv Gandhi's 1984 victory is especially instructive. That election revealed a nation in mourning, cleaving to the consolation of its history. This election reveals the opposite: A nation fed up with its past.

Modi is the first head of government to have been born after 1947, and his relationship to India's recent and ancient history is casual and instrumental. To him, as to many of the young people he will now represent, the past is a rubblescape of injury — to be avenged.

Modi's conception of power is also profoundly different from any in India's past traditions. Whether one goes back to Ashoka or to Akbar, even our most imperious rulers were attended by some self-questioning, a trace of self-irony, the odd mood of detachment. What Modi offers is a conception of political power unhampered by ambivalence, hesitation or jealousy of power. It's a beautifully utilitarian image calculated to appeal to an Indian political imagination that, after more than a decade of uneven economic development, has never been more restless and impatient — an electorate for whom doubt is a luxury.

There are few more authentic outsiders to India's present or its past than Narendra Modi — whether reckoned by social background, by his personal connections in Delhi, or by his sense of India's history. Formally entering the national arena in summer 2013, Modi dominated it with astonishing rapidity. Sidelining his party elders, he used new and old media — metal painted hoardings and meta-data, psephology and the selfie — to imprint himself on a diffidence-weary public imagination.

In his manifesto for the 2012 Gujarat elections, Modi named his campaign target group: the 'neo middle class.' The group's constituents remained a little vague, even to him; 'we will form a committee to define this neo middle class', he promised. But the term's elasticity brilliantly accommodated the hopes of hundreds of millions of partial beneficiaries of development, including many in limbo between rural and urban India, who cared less about their supposed current identities, and more about what they wanted to be.

From the insight — that we had all grown more alike in our dreams, even as we remained as divided and contentious in our waking realities — Modi built a magnetic campaign.

So now we enter a new, less predictable phase of Indian democracy, as more citizens slip loose from their caste, religious or political traditions to vote as individuals. It's an irreversible momentum, for once people cast a ballot free of group obligation or community expectation, it is hard to get them, once again, to wear old uniforms.

Modi has invited Indians into a new and potent imaginary community of his creation: an aspirational iCloud, where every Indian can upload their wish list. This dreambank now hovers compellingly but uneasily over our jagged, fragmented social reality of enduring caste and religious differences. Revolutions, democratic ones too, are made out of hope for the future. But in a 21st-century democracy, the future comes fast, and impatience follows as swiftly.

Narendra Modi has won himself an extraordinary opportunity, at a critical moment in India's history. May he use it well. For, the electorate now knows as well as he does the exhilarating, upending power of their votes.